VOICING: IDENTIFY AND ARTICULATE YOUR BRAND

 

BENEFIT TO THE INSTITUTION
The establishment of a clear, compelling identity that connects to and ignites the passions of all those current and future members of the school’s community.

 

HOW IT HAPPENS
Our brand development teams employ a disciplined process called Market VoicingSM as supported by the more undisciplined, but equally important application of imagination and creativity. We conduct a series of stakeholder interviews along with a comprehensive audit of current communications and peer school marketing programs. Current quantitative data, if available, is factored in as well. The brand identity is built from our careful analysis of these current perceptions of an institution among its various publics and against its competition.

 

We dig deeply into and make connections between the school’s current reality, history, plans for the future, and needs of its community of stakeholders. For each institution, this analysis pivots around our central goal: to find the most defining character of that institution and evolve from it a competitively distinct, strategic brand position. No two results are ever the same because the soul of every institution is unique.

 

What makes our process so effective is first and foremost its practitioners: our teams of senior level brand development professionals work hard to find the best solution, which is invariably not the first or most obvious one.

 

EVIDENCE OF RESULTS
The clients for whom we have developed a brand identity program have experienced the following:

• A research study conducted for a regional, comprehensive college in Western New York indicates that the brand awareness campaign had significant positive impact on the perceptions of the regional community.
  
  
• A brand awareness campaign for a preparatory school achieved the primary goal of developing a waiting list for admissions and, as summarized in a quote from a board member, “Finally gave us the language to describe what is so special about this school.”
  
  
• Still in the initial stages of implementation, a brand image study for a top tier, nationally ranked college is motivating staff and faculty. This quote comes from a senior academic officer:
  
  “I thought the Brand Identity program was so smart, so sophisticated, so in touch with where we are and want to be, and, also, so very moving. It made me reconsider my plan to go on the market next year in the search for a provost's job. And that, I suppose, is one of the tests to which you would subject a branding exercise--does it reconnect and re–ignite the passions of the people already here? For me, at least, the answer is yes.”